Information Research Weblog

I think the problem with this much repeated, so-called hierarchy, is that no one can actually find anything to do with it. It is quoted time after time, often in ways that lead one to think that the writer assumes s/he has invented it, but, in the end, the only parts of the hierarchy that have any practical significance are 'data' and 'information' - in fact, since information is so difficult to define, one could probably remove that and claim that virtually all so-called information systems are simply data processing systems. And no matter who the writer may be, once the hierarchy has been quoted, s/he gets down to the practicalities of data processing or information systems.

Bellinger, et al., who wrote this piece are a prime example of the problem - where does it lead? Nowhere as far as I can see. Or am I being too unkind?

I was forwarded the following link that deals with definitions for various KM concepts.

Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom are defined separately according to Ackoff, however the author of the article below considers understanding to not be a level but the x-axis, a measuring tool that separates the other four. I didn't delve much deeper than that (and the article probably doesn't say much more than that). I didn't find anything to disagree with.

http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm

Grahame Gould has drawn my attention to some discusson on a records management list RECORDS-MANAGEMENT-UK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, relating to the proposed British Standard on 'knowledge management'. Evidence for how much confusion there is regarding the concept is found in a statement from one Ian Brewer, a marketing manager:

"KM is more about information as an asset whereas RM is about creating a process by which you can store and retrieve information. For example, RM is simply about saying "all of our records on a specific topic are here". He adds that "a records management policy can add to an overall KM strategy".

Note that km is about "information as an asset" - now where have we heard about information being an asset to be controlled and managed in the same way as other assets? From the early days of information management of course. Just as an example, here's a title from the Proceedings of the 1984 annual conference of the ACM on The fifth generation challenge: "Treating information as an asset". 1984 you note - almost 20 years ago, and the BSI imagines it is something new?! In fact, the idea goes back to the Commission on Federal Paperwork of 1977 (which included electronic documents).

It really is astonishing, or is it? We have what appears to be a whole group of people entirely disconnected from information management or records management, who see fit to pronounce on so-called 'knowledge management' without having the slightest idea of what they are talking about. Ignorance rules these days!

John Holgate has drawn the attention of IR-Discuss members to the:

Plumb Visual Thesaurus developed since 1996 in the Princeton University Concept Labs. IMO it's the biggest breakthrough in semantics since Carnap invented 'intension'.

It is interesting that the VT's 'view' of the concept information comes directly from the Princetonian definition:

'a message sent and received that reduces the receiver's uncertainty' (ho hum)

but it also separates out facts/documents/data from 'selective information' (a la Shannon communication theory) and the entropy/ectropy strand beloved of the physicists.

The strange little entity labelled 'info', which is appearing more and more in biology circles is, perhaps fittingly, without a definition.

I suggest you try playing with 'knowledge' and 'experience' for good measure and see how meanings appear to have their own momentum and relationships - like in the world beyond thesauri and dictionaries.

Thanks for that, John.

An interesting item on The Shifted Librarian caught my eye: "When does 'own' not mean 'own'?" It's a cautionary tale about the US library supplier Baker and Taylor who have plans for the electronic delivery of texts using the .pdf format. No problem you think? Well - read all about it for another example of the desire of business to sell you something and hold on to it at the same time.

The same source has a defense of news aggregators. I never realised that a defense was needed: I can't think how I'd scan as much material as I do without NewzCrawler. However, The Shifted Librarian points to an article by one Steve Bell (presumably not the Guardian satirical cartoonist) on a e-zine called Ex Libris in which, among other things, he notes:

RSS and news aggregator enthusiasts will emphasize that these technologies will save you time as they improve your access to news and information. But does the time required to obtain the necessary skills to use them payoff in the long run? I'm suspicious of anyone who claims something is easy and fast to learn and implement, but tells me I need to first read a four-page article that explains how it works.

Read a four-page article? I've installed Newz Crawler and used it for months now without reading anything at all about how to use it. I also used Amphetadesk for a while and that, too, required no reading - you just get on with using it!

Talking of aggregators, I came across an interesting one - SNARF - which lives on your Internet Explorer 'links' bar and which you can pop up at any time - worth a look.

There seems to be a buzz going these days on the applications of faceted classification - it's a little curious that in the days of search engines and the wide belief that they can solve all retrieval problems (even if the IR researchers do not claim this) the 'information architecture' and 'knowledge management' fraternity should be turning to a method I first learnt about almost fifty years ago. I even sat at the feet of Shiyali Ramarita Ranganathan when he made his farewell tour of library schools in the UK. We had spent two days talking with him (conversation was his teaching method - he let you learn things, rather than trying to teach you) and by the time came for him to give a public address, he had lost his voice. It was a little curious to hear the whispered words of Ranganathan repeated in a strong Scottish accent by the then Head of Department! I still have the sheet of paper upon which he wrote the Five Laws of Library Science and then signed his name in English, Hindi, Sanskrit and, I think, Tamil. I went on to teach the subject for quite a few years - including following a number of well-known British teachers to the University of Maryland for a year because the Dean, Paul Wasserman, felt that there was more to classification than the schedules of the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification schemes. The students in those years - between about 1965 and 1970 - were possibly the only ones in the USA getting that treatment.

Now the Weblogs buzz with the novelty of the ideas that Ranganathan first developed in his Colon Classfication of 1933 - yup, seventy years ago.

Links to chase down:

The Knowledge Management Connection - which is very keen to tell us that faceted classification is "Not just a library science technique", almost as though that would taint it.

Ranganathan for IAs

Faceted Movable Type

Ranganathan's rigorous analysis of the principles upon which all classification is based is contained in his 'Prolegomena to library classification' - but you can find a simplified version here:

A simplified model for facet analysis - I only put this one in because I get cited :-) (Only joking)

A tribute to SR Ranganathan, the father of Indian Library Science by Eugene Garfield - who also met SRR. See also Part II of the tribute.

Was Ranganathan a Yahoo!?

Ranganthan ahead of his century.

Ranganathan and Facet Analysis - an unlikely source, perhaps, but he is creeping in all over the place.

Here's something for those who are involved in, or about to be involved in, setting up a corporate intranet. The Intranet Road Map

Thanks to Column Two for that one.

The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a useful pointer to things that are happening around the world, if only to remind us how sloppy is the use of the English language. An example is found in a link to Stakeholder interviews as simple knowledge mapping which includes questions such as:

• What information do you rely on during a normal working day?
• Where do you obtain this information from?
• If you have a question, where do you go to find an answer?
• Which sources of news do you regularly read?

Those seem like quite ordinary 'information needs' questions to me - and quite why a selection of staff in an organization should be called 'stakeholders' escapes me.

For some time I have been drawing attention in my quarterly Editorial to the papers with most hits. I only got round to putting counters on the papers in the first three volumes last December, so those papers have been recording hits for a shorter period of time than others. It made sense, therefore to present a list that takes this into account, so here we are. This is a list of the 'top ten' based on a ranking by 'hits per month' since a counter was attached.

Two interesting points emerge out of the exercise: first, as one might expect, the 'knowledge management' issue has an extremely well-hit set of papers, and secondly, apart from this, there are popular papers throughout the series, including one from volume 1 no. 1.

1.   The nonsense of knowledge management, by T.D. Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 14790      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 1643

2.   Web search: how the Web has changed information retrieval, by Terrence A. Brooks
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3757      Months counting - 3      Hits per month - 1252

3.   Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective, by France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer
Total hits 25.7.03 - 6020      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 669

4.   The duality of knowledge, by Paul M. Hildreth and Chris Kimble
Total hits 25.7.03 - 5925      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 658

5.   An action research approach to curriculum development, by P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3461      Months counting - 7       Hits per month - 494

6.   Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning, by Chun Wei Choo
Total hits 25.7.03 - 9399      Months counting - 21      Hits per month - 448

7.   Scanning The Business Environment For Information:A Grounded Theory Approach, Zita Correia and Tom Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 2987      Months counting - 7      Hits per month - 427

8.   Student attitudes towards electronic information resources, by Kathryn Ray andJoan Day
Total hits 25.7.03 - 19714      Months counting - 54      Hits per month - 366

9.   Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach, by Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 9232      Months counting - 27      Hits per month - 342

10.   Knowledge management: another management fad?, Leonard J. Ponzi and Michael Koenig
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3071      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 341

The final report on the first stage of Project INISS has long been out of print. Now I'm scanning in and creating a Web site for it, since it was a fairly unusual piece of work for the time.

I'm putting up the Chapters as I produce them and you can find the first at http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/INISS/index.html

This chapter deals with the structured observation method used in the research and may be of continuing interest because that method is still relatively little-used.

The 'public prints' over the holiday period have brought us accidentally related news - a pity, really, that one or two journalists had not read the words of another before enthusing over the possibility that the value of investment in information technology might now be discovered. Both the Financial Times and the Sunday Telegraph carried news of Bill Gates's investment in the Centre for Information Work Productivity (we can only be glad that the word 'knowledge' was rejected!) at MIT. The aim of the Centre is to discover, through a study of 100 companies, best practice in the application of IT and to measure its impact on the bottom line.

No matter that it has all been done before - members of this list will recall, I'm sure, Strassman, P.A. (1990) The business value of computers, New Canaan, CT: The Information Economics Press - which signally failed to uncover the magic formula. Strassman found that investment in IT failed to deliver increased 'management productivity' until that investment exceeded 50% of total investment in management productivity - if my memory serves me right and his scatter diagram of the relationship of spend to productivity showed no trend line at all, but a fog of points.

The reason, of course, is that investment in IT (including the software that Microsoft is so anxiuous to sell) will have no impact at all unless the information managed by the software and the technology is appropriate, timely, accurate, etc., etc. - and very few companies are interested in spending the amount of money required to get that right.

There's another reason why IT spend may fail to deliver - and that was conveyed in an article in The Observer on the extent to which people are fleeing the city and its stresses for a more relaxed life. It noted:

A recent American study found that even in the boom year of 1993, nearly half of all US employers laid off workers. That pattern has been mirrored on this side of the Atlantic. And if employers are no longer perceived to be loyal to us, even in the good times, why on earth should we be loyal to them?

Good question! I recall a study by Dahl, but can't locate the reference, which showed that the principal driver of improved productivity was staff motivation. Mmmm.

Another information-related topic hit the newsprints - the increasing totalitarian slant of US institutions. Clear Channel is a media giant I'd never even heard of, but one of its Board members is Thomas O. Hicks, who helped Bush to become a millionaire. The report says, "Clear Channel is accused of drumming up support for the war in Iraq, while muzzling those who oppose it. When Natialie Maines, singer of the Texas band The Dixie Chicks, commented that she was ashamed of the president, Clear Channel country radio stations were the first to drop the band from playlists." New York Times writer Paul Krugman is reported as saying: "We should have realised this is a two-way street. If politicians are doing favours for businesses that support them, why shouldn't we expect businesses to reciprocate by doing favours for those politicians?"

Also in The Observer was the keynote address to journalists by Tim Robbins at the National Press Club - read it here. If you weren't worried before, you'll be worried after reading it.

Have a good week!

[I tried mailing this to the log, but for some reason, my messages don't seem to be getting through to Free-Conversant - can't understand why. Perhaps I'll start using one of my other e-mail systems]

An interesting site for those interested in Information Management, Content Management and Records Management is a site by Rick Barry. There is a massive amount of information on there, and personally I find it confusing to navigate, but then I also don't profess to be expert at searching the web.

I did see somewhere on there that Rick has admitted the site has expanded faster than he could keep up with to catalogue it, so hopefully he'll get time to have a look at it some time. However, don't take that as a criticism - it does have excellent information on it and is well worth wading through to find all the gems.

Ah, I was just about to give you some examples of pages on his site, but it's all in frames, so go hunting ...

Very interesting site, Chris - it will also be interesting to see how the rankings change as other things come on line.

Your point about the lack of communication among the various areas of the 'information field' is also spot on - this is one of the things that IR is trying to change, by publishing information systems papers, as well as information management papers. David Ellis, David Allen and I wrote a paper a couple of years or so ago which looked at the lack of cross citation between information science and information systems in two areas where one might expect common interests - information retrieval and information seeking behaviour (user requirements in info. systems parlance). We found very few people who were cited in both fields.

Ellis, D., Allen, D.K. & Wilson, T.D. (1999) Information science and information systems: conjunct subjects disjunct disciplines. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50, 1095-1107

Social network theory seems to me to be one of those techniques that simply reports the obvious: however, if you are into that kind of thing you might be interested in a site, Buddy Zoo, that applies the ideas to 'buddy lists' in instant messaging systems. You have to have an AOL Instant Messaging user-name to sign up to see the information - and I couldn't be bothered to do that, since I get enough stuff by other means already. Still, the maps on the top page look pretty enough - according to Slashdot the site was created by a student at Caltech, and I imagine that students are among the prime users of IM.

Colleagues may be interested in a block of papers from the ALIA Conference. Some well known names there, with generally quite brief papers.

No - not the old man's bone structure, but the skeleton of the classification scheme.

An interesting presentation on "Improving Subject Access in OPACs using Dewey and View-Based Searching" by Steve Pollit and Amanda Tinker. Also, a guided tour of the system here.

From FreePint via an Australian Weblog Column Two, comes a report on how Delft Technological University chose its new 'content management system'. You can Google for CMS here.

Following up Grahame Gould's recommendation of the Canadian site, I see that ZDNet has an item on enterprise portals that might be interesting to some.

The article, by Kevin Foster, talks of 'navigating the seven-Cs' - I'll leave it to you to find out what they are (and how far 'C' is stretched to accommodate the pun!)

Thanks to Grahame Gould for drawing attention to a Canadian government Web site with some interesting links to various documents on Web portal policies. The page gives links to other sites which cover Architecture, Focus Studies and Public Opinion Research, Case Studies, Portal Examples, Content Management, and Strategies and Implementation.

The site also includes pages on other useful information management topics such as: Classification, Thesauri and Controlled Vocabularies, Electronic Publishing, and Records & Document Management.

Occasionally I receive a message telling me that Information Research, or one of the other resources at InformationR.net has been linked to from another site. I usually take a look to find out what is there. On this occasion, yesterday, it was from Keith Hamilton, who runs a site called Nature IQ, which provides links to all kinds of information resources on all kinds of subjects. Now, you might ask, What is the point of this, when so many directories exist? I think the answer is that a personal view on what is available, which you have selected according to your own quality guidelines, probably has something going for it, which a simple directory, based on spiders running around the Web looking for possible additions, does not.

One of the things it guided me to was the Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science - a pretty impressive piece of work. Slow to load, because it is all one big page, but useful for newcomers.

Well - take a look for yourself and see what you think. The interface is pretty basic and rather ugly, but...

A good deal of the knowledge management literature actually deals with communication in organizations and it is welcome to see an item on ZDNet that deals with this in terms of communication rather than in terms of km. Collaboration: Real time, real value?, by Dan Farber, deals mainly with instant messaging, which is now available in a variety of forms for use within business, rather than across the Internet. There's also an interview with Simon Hayward of the consulancy group, Gartner, which, sad to say reveals virtually total ignorance of the way people work in offices. He tells us, for example, that a message will be 'less intrusive' than a 'phone call - exactly how is not made clear. We're also advised that messaging will increase trust! I would have thought that without trust in the first place you can't get going with messaging.

Fortunately the readers of ZDNet appear to be very well aware of the problems and limitations of the technology. For example, one correspondent on the Feedback notes something of interest against the IT hype:

I’ve worked in places that use both Outlook and Notes and at least 95% of the people used them exclusively for email. The other 5% used the calendar features occasionally. That’s a lot in licensing fees for something that could be substituted for free. It leads you to believe that before free/open source will succeed on cost alone, the decision makers have to lose their emotional attachment with some of these apps. I’ve even seen certain processes made compulsory using features in these suites, for no apparent reason other than to justify the purchase.

And another observes a core problem:

The last thing I need is more real-time interrupts during the day. As it is, my productivity is down almost half because I can't complete even a simple task before someone phones, drops by, or otherwise demands my attention. Once they're taken care of, it takes several minutes to get back into the context of what I was doing again, at which point the next interruption occurs.

and another:

Attempting to replace face to face meetings with IM is nothing but a marketing attempt by those very companies to sell more software. I don't NEED MORE INTERRUPTIONS during the day than I already get from phone and email while working.

and another:

The problem with most modern forms of communication is that you can't tell if the other person is busy. As already pointed out the business day has too many interuptions in it to begin with.

Finally, it is interesting that several of the ideas discussed here were actually incorporated into trial systems in 1985 when I was investigating the Department of Trade and Industry's 'office automation' pilots. Things don't always move rapidly in IT :-) And, you know, it might be a good idea for the vendors of these systems to check on the outcomes of those pilots - I imagine that the reason that such a time has passed before some elements reached the market is that it was found that no one wanted them!

My visit to Amsterdam was an interesting one: Professor Rik Maes of the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics at the University of Amsterdam has established a research group, PrimaVera which is undertaking a programme of research that many readers of Information Research will find of value. The group has published a number of papers and also produces a working papers series. Key in the group's work is the development of a 'generic framework for information management', which also guides the teaching programmes, especially the Executive Master's in Information Management.

I don't know how many of you are interested in RM issues, but it's the area of "Information Management" in which I work, so sorry if you couldn't care less about it - skip to the next post. :-) http://www.rmaa.com.au/ is the home page for the Records Management Association of Australia and they have a listserv which you can join by going to http://listserver.cowan.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/rmaa and the archive of previous posts is found at http://listserver.cowan.edu.au/pipermail/rmaa/

I was out interviewing in a company today as part of my current project on 'information overload'. My colleague, David Allen, and I were interviewing two senior executives and the conversation got round to the impact of the organization's culture on the phenomenon. The company was described as one in which people were under pressure, as a result of 'careful headcount control' and that their (the executives') view was that they hired the kind of people who liked the adrenaline rush, who worked late and intensively, who took their mobile phones away on holiday to be in touch and so on. They were rather nonplussed by my question, "But does the company actually need to be like this?" We never got a clear answer, but the general impression was that, actually, it didn't need to be like that.

I think we are all aware of the damage that this mode of work does to people - stress related sickness also takes its toll of the company. So why is it happening in this country more than anywhere else in the world? How many companies actually need to pressurise people to the point of breakdown when they are in profit, with good market share, and so on? It certainly isn't only the companies that are in trouble that behave this way - even successful companies exhibit the syndrome but not, according to Jim Collins, the truly great ones. Are we on a spiralling track to self-destruct?

The relevance of this for 'information overload'? Well, to date, our feeling is that cultures of this kind result in what we've called 'aberrant communication behaviour', which results in 'watch your back' communications and other mal-practices that increase overload. The culture also fosters work overload, and the response to that is often to generate information overload on others.

The technology is often blamed for overload, but the causes go much deeper.

I suppose that, as I run a fairly complex site like InformationR.net, I ought to have been interested in Content Management Systems (CMS) a long time ago. However, my attention has been drawn to them again by David Gurteen's 'Knowledge-Letter' - check out his Web site - via a link to Why every small website needs a content management system . A short, interesting read, but my interest took a step back at the statement:

The good news is that a lightweight CMS, suitable for a modest-sized website, is not expensive. It can be as low as a few thousand dollars...

That's Australian dollars, of course, but, even so, my base rate is zero, so there's a while before I give up my do-it-yourself system. Small businesses might think differently, however.

I don't know how many of you are interested in RM issues, but it's the area of "Information Management" in which I work, so sorry if you couldn't care less about it - skip to the next post. :-) http://www.rmaa.com.au/ is the home page for the Records Management Association of Australia and they have a listserv which you can join by going to http://listserver.cowan.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/rmaa and the archive of previous posts is found at http://listserver.cowan.edu.au/pipermail/rmaa/